Virtue Signaling is the Fastest Growing Vice in America

A quick stroll on social media reveals most people love showing that they are good. Whether by expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing a celebrity’s racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.

Unlike the helping where you have to do something – help an old lady cross the street, volunteer to give meals to the dispossessed, go door-to-door to fundraise for a cause – virtue signaling often consists of completely costless actions, such as changing your profile picture or saying you don’t like a politician’s stance on immigration.

In everyday discourse, the people who accuse others of virtue signaling are often not interested in doing fundamental moral analysis – mostly, they want to discredit their political opponents.

Over the past few decades, scientists have developed sophisticated analyses of signaling as a general phenomenon – how humans (and other animals) send signals designed to convey information to other individuals. The insights of signaling theory can be counterintuitive and have had an enormous impact on biology and the social sciences. They also tell us that virtue signaling is more nuanced and interesting than the picture painted by conventional wisdom and political rhetoric. As it turns out, there are bad and good things about virtue signaling – but probably not for the reasons you think.

Do we dare ask why we scold virtue signallers for having it easy? The urge to dismiss someone’s actions because they took no effort is powerful. But does it not make more sense to focus on what that action achieves? Why do we often focus on the costs people pay rather than how effective they are at making the world better?

Recruiters are the most prominent champions for virtue signaling in today's job market. Why do employers care that you put yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get an Ivy League degree in sociology with no apparent relevance to the job? Instead, employers select their employees based on signals that are difficult to fake, such as university degrees. In general, having the qualities employers value makes it easier to get a degree. People who do not have the right mix of intelligence, conscientiousness and ambition will find college more complicated and either drop out or spend much more time completing their studies. People who anticipate getting a degree would be too costly for them will opt out.

So, in principle, even if nothing you had learnt was relevant to the job you want, completing the degree still sends a valuable signal to potential employers: you are the kind of person for whom this high-effort achievement is easy enough. Because it sends a useful signal, it is in your interest to get a degree and in the employer’s interest to hire you on its basis.

People want to appear good because it wins them friends and social status. Throughout human evolution, being able to discriminate true allies (who stick with you no matter what) from fair-weather friends (who abandon you when you fall ill) could make the difference between life and death. As such, humans are obsessed with moral hypocrisy.

Conclusion

Hindsight is often 20/20. I continue to wonder how many of my former coworkers were fair-weather friends and which were true allies and how I would understand this critical distinction from now on.

When we see someone virtue signaling, we often have strong reactions – sometimes admiration, sometimes annoyance or contempt. But these intuitions are the product of psychological mechanisms that are designed to help us evaluate if that person could be a good friend or a good ally, not to help us assess whether the person’s action will have a positive impact on the world. The emerging science of signaling shows that these things can often come apart. Keeping this insight in mind is essential as we navigate an increasingly noisy world.

As America fragments itself, I wonder what it will take for society to understand that virtue signaling isn’t the same as virtue – it furthers the partisan divide

.#diversitymatters #inclusionmatters #maga #ceoaction #executivecoaching #gartnersymposium #gartnersym #blacklivesmatter #wallstreetjournal #harvardbusinessreview #diversityandinclusion #opentowork #hiring #leadership #ceoleadership #enterprisearchitecture #securityculture #humanresources